Before I send Chandra the shipping details, please confirm you are still ready to undertake this project. It would help if you could summarize the experiments you felt necessary. I am hoping you will use additional equipment and techniques.

I am concerned over contamination and will ask Chandra to discuss the status of contamination of the rock with you by email.

Once you are ready and have OK’d the project, I would like to track your progress in a BLOG. I think the global community will be very interested.

The following six (6) peer-reviewed papers represent what was completed, documented and published in 2013 :

I personally conducted the study of nitrogen levels present in diatoms, cyanobacterial filaments, Hystrichospheres and actriarch fossils that I found embedded in the Polonnaruwa stones that O personally collected in Sri Lanka. These studies were carried out at NASA/MSFC and at Cardiff University in collaboration with Prof. Wickramasinghe and other members of the team.

The stones contained clearly biological forms that did not contain detectable nitrogen levels.

1. This is not Necessary for the forms to be indigenous to the stones rather than contaminants. If the diatoms & Cyanobacteria had lived on the parent body and died in the last hundred thousand years or so, then they could contain nitrogen and still be extraterrestrial.

2. The absence of nitrogen in Biological remains in the stones is SUFFICIENT to establish that these remains are NOT MODERN CONTAMINANTS.

The Polonnaruwa stones fell on Dec. 29, 2012. Any microbes that entered the stones after they fell would contain detectable levels of Nitrogen. That also applies to the other carbonaceous meteorites that I have examined. Alais fell in 1806— only a little over 200 years ago. The loss of Nitrogen requires geological time periods (millions of years) rather than weeks or centuries.

The other tests 2, 3, and 4 are not necessary to conclude that the fossils in Polonnaruwa are indigenous. Those studies have been performed by many other researchers on a wide variety ofCI1 and CM2 meteorites that also contain fossils that lack nitrogen. Those remains have also been dismissed as recent contaminants—with no effort to answer the problems posed by the missing biomolecules—which would certainly be present if the stones contained post arrival biological remains.

You did not answer my question in the prior e-mail. Did you ask Caleb or any of the other critics how they can explain the absence of these life critical biomolecules in stones contaminated after they landed by living terrestrial microbes? I have discussed this problem with prominent biochemists and microbiologists and have yet to hear any Answer whatsoever.

As NASA has now changed its overall mission tag from “Search for Water” to “Seeking the Signs of Life”; and as missions to Titan, Enceladus, Europa and Mars are planned to “seek for the signs of life”, the astrobiologists of this new generation are no longer constrained to seek life just on earth.

The spread of material from Mars to Earth and back, is proven and accepted; the associated spread of viruses and bacteria, live, dessicated or fossilized, is statistically likely and studied by astrobiologists in Universities around the world. It is now mainstream science, so get over it.

The Hoyle-Wickramasinghe Model of Panspermia has remained the most likely model for over 40 years and over the last 5 years discoveries in deep earth, deep rock and deep space have increased the likelihood that we will find our “little friends” on most solar system bodies – from Mars, Titan, Europa and Enceladus.

Comets with their short orbits contained within the inner solar system, (ie short period comets), have likely seen continuous transfer of microbes since “Day 1”. Rosetta’s Comet 67P is a 8 year orbit comet, so it falls into the category of very likely containing solar system microbes. Personally I am more excited about long period comets like ISON coming in from the Oort Cloud and likely even adjacent stars. There is every possibility they contain new strains of microbes.

But 67P is “one of ours”. So if Rosetta and Philae experiments find “NO” microbes, this will indeed be a major discovery and will be a start of a huge rethink. Even challenging the validity of Panspermia.

The probability is Sir Fred Hoyle and Chandra Wickramasinghe will be again proven right and their vision acknowledged. Surely, in this birth centenary year of Sir Fred, the champagne will flow at Churchill College, Cambridge University, UK.

A sleepy little Indian town called Changa in the district of Anand in the State of Gujarat came alive from 21st-24th June with the descent of scores of astronomers and physicists from across in India and abroad. The publication of the very first paper by Albert Einstein on the General Theory of Relativity in 1915 and the centenary of Fred Hoyle’s birth on 24 June 1915 were the dual reason for this noteworthy event. The venue was a modern, well-appointed campus of the Charusat University of Science and Technology, located some 40 minutes drive away from a 3-star hotel in which all the participants were housed.

The conference was convened by Dr. J.J. Rawal under the auspices of the Indian Planetary Society and chaired by the eminent industrialist and sponsor Dr.Mohanbhal Patel. Following the opening ceremony on 21 June, with the traditional lighting of oil lamps to signify a new awakening, the meeting was launched.

The first two days of formal sessions on 22nd and 23rd June were largely devoted to matters connected with Relativity and Cosmology. Jayant Narlikar’s father V.V. Narlikar, who was a student at Cambridge in the 1930’s and a pupil of Sir Arthur Eddington, was the trail blazer for Relativity research in India and he had inspired two generations of young Indians to explore ideas in this field.

The distinguished cosmologist, Professor Thanu Padmanabhan, who was one time Sackler Distinguished Professor at Cambridge University and is now a Professor at the Inter-Universities Centre for Astronomy and Astrophysics at Pune India, gave a stimulating opening talk on 22 June in which he described his new ideas about the geometry of space-time and gravity being an emergent property from some deeper thermodynamic principle. J.V. Narlikar next talked about his collaboration with Fred Hoyle on C-field (creation field) cosmology which was an attempt to formulate rigorously the Steady-State Theory of the Universe. This was followed by other speakers who covered a variety of more conventional aspects of cosmology and general relativity.

The Fred Hoyle day on 24th June 2015 (Hoyle’s birth centenary) started with a brilliant presentation by Hoyle’s oldest living student Professor Leon Mestel (92). Leon Mestel was unable to attend in person, but his contribution was read out by Jayant Narlikar. Then came a talk by Peter Eggleton who had collaborated on stellar structure with Fred Hoyle in the 1960’s. The session included a talk by Fred Hoyle’s daughter Elizabeth Butler who gave some of her personal reminiscences. This presentation also peered beyond Fred Hoyle’s relatively impoverished childhood to a more distant lineage that included one noted poet (Ben Preston) and members of the British aristocracy and intellectual elite.

The meeting closed with my 50-minute talk on “Convergence to Cosmic Biology”. Here I traced the steps in my 40-year-long collaboration with Hoyle that had led us from studies of carbonaceous interstellar dust to the theory that life is a cosmic phenomenon.

Since Fred Hoyle’s death in 2001 new results from astronomy, geology and biology, including DNA sequence studies, have shown our theory to be amply vindicated. A major scientific paradigm shift with far-reaching societal implications appears to loom large on the horizon.